Ignjat Đurđević
Ignjat Đurđević (Đorđić) (1675 – 1737)
Đurđević was a baroque Dalmatian writer.
Biography
Ignjat Đurđević was born in 1675 in Dubrovnik as the son of a family recently raised to peerage. First, he started a secular career. He became commander of the fortress Lovrijenac and later ruler (“knez”) on the island of Šipan. During this time, he wrote his first poems and a translation of psalms.
In Rome, he entered the order of the Jesuits. As a Jesuit teacher, he travelled through Italy. In 1705, he left the order and became Benedictine in the monastwery of St. Jacob in Dubrovnik one year later.
In 1710, he was expelled from Dubrovnik because of political activities. Again he went to Italy, where he continued working as a teacher. When returning to Dubrovnik, he was warmly welcomed and offered several functions. For one year, he was president of the Academi of the “Isprazni”. He refused the function of a bishop offered to him, but he was recongnized as most important theologist of the Republic. He died 1737 in Dubrovnik.
Bibliography
Đurđević was strongly influenced by classical literature, most of all Ovid. To him, he dedicated the first poem of his love poems “Ljuvene pjesni”.
Đurđević started to write very early. He wrote in Croatian, Latin and Italian language, prose a swell as poetry.
In 1708, an anthology in Latin language was published: “Poetici lusus varii”. In 1716, his Croatian poems “Pjesni razlike” (Various poems) appeared. He wrote St. Benedicts’s biography in Croatian, St. Paul’s in Latin language.
Đurđević has also written a comedy in the dialect of the island of Mljet: “Suze Marunkove” (marunko’s tears). Very important sources are the “Historija Ilirije”, a history of his home country, and “Vitae et carminae nonnullorum illustrium vivium Rhacusinorum” (The lives and poems of some famous inhabitants of Dubrovnik).
Literature
- Kombol, Mihovil, Povijest Hrvatske Književnosti do Narodnog preporoda, II. Izdanje, Zagreb 1961
- Lachmann-Schmohl, Renate, Ignjat Djordjić. Eine stilistische Untersuchung zum slavischen Barock, Köln-Graz 1964